down. She felt a deeper change in him, something she did not
understand. The worn harassed expression she had so often seen on his
face while his wife had been alive, the look of a man driven and drained
of his vitality, was now gone; and in its place was an unconscious look
of content. He often stayed very late at the office; and more and more
in his evenings at home he went to his desk and became absorbed in
documents and blue print plans.

"What a refuge a man's business is," she thought with a twinge of envy.

And wistfully she began to look about for some resource for herself.
She felt the youth within her rise, but the city seemed so vast and
strange. In her loneliness the big building of which her present home
was a part, seemed doubly huge, impersonal, hard; and so did every other
building on that block appear. She felt lost, left out amid ceaseless
tides of gaiety on every hand. She took long determined walks, and on
these walks she donned the smart attractive clothes that she had bought
with Amy. She strove to keep her mind on the sights, the faces of
people afoot and in cars, the adorable things in shop windows. And she
chatted busily to herself in order to keep on admiring. This old habit
of hers, of soliloquy, had grown upon her unawares, as a refuge from her
loneliness. Sometimes she even talked aloud. Sturdily she told
herself:

"You've only begun. You'll get up out of this, Ethel Knight--just wait.
Can't you give a few months to Amy now?"

And scowling at her "morbidness" in feeling dreary and forlorn, she
resolutely scanned the papers for news of lectures, plays and concerts.
She went to a few in the afternoons, and dressed for them as carefully
as though they were great social affairs. And in the intermissions when
a buzz of talk would rise, she would begin with quick animation to
converse with herself and be gay, or alert and argumentative. Her lips
would move inaudibly. Now and then she would brightly smile and nod
across the house at some friend she pretended to have seen. She
enrolled for a course of lectures upon "Mental Science." She resumed her
reading of magazines and books on all kinds of topics. It made her
think of high school days, and hungrily she reached back for that old.
zest and inquisitiveness about everything under the moon and stars.

And through this searching she caught hints of the presence in the city
of a life wider and deeper than shops and yet not antagonistic--a life
o